Excerpt from Tri-Nitro-Glycerin: As Applied in the Hoosac Tunnel, and to Submarine Blasting, Torpedoes, Quarrying, Etc
Since the last edition of this work, the withdrawal of a suit and promised payment of costs by the president of the United States blasting oil company, now defunct, renders superfluous any details of the litigation I have had to sustain, in order to protect the public against an attempt to monopolize Sobrero’s discovery of nitro-glycerin. And further, since it is now admitted that this explosive is the most powerful known to man, being in fact the ideal of portable force, it seemed to me I might properly omit the anecdotes of early difficulties encoun tored in its introduction to the Hoosac tunnel the miners’ prejudices have now disappeared, and those who obstructed its use have since threatened to strike, if deprived of tri-nitro glycerin for a month, in order to institute a strict comparative test with powder; men who for thirty years lived through pow der smoke, in their mining operations, declaring it unfit for a human being to endure in deep shafts or long tunnel. These omissions have enabled me to rewrite the work, to add tabula ted results, and give a resume of the old world’s experience and experiments with gun cotton, so that, if less interesting to the general reader, the substituted matter is perhaps of more value to the engineer, contractor and projectors of international im provements, which cannot be carried through in any reasonable period without this powerful agent. I am more than ever sen sible that my exacting occupation unfits for literary success, to which this book has no pretensions.
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